Interpretive Summary: Automation of irrigation canals provides potential for many water districts to improve their operations and conserve water. Worldwide, improvements in canal operations can increase world food production. Most of the canal automation that has been used in practice consists of local automatic control for individual gates or a centralized control scheme developed for a particular canal. Few of the published centralized control schemes have actually been tested on real canals. In this paper, two different control methods were tested in real time on the WM canal at the Maricopa Stanfield Irrigation and Drainage District, Stanfield, AZ.: Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). Both controllers successfully controlled the canal. The paper described differences in controller performance. These results will be of use to irrigation and large water districts, the Bureau of Reclamation, and consultants.

Technical Abstract:
Water resources are limited in many agricultural areas. One method to improve the effective use of water is to improve
delivery service from irrigation canals. This can be done by applying automatic control methods that control the gates in an irrigation canal. The model predictive control MPC is one such advanced control method. In this article, the MPC is used to deliver irrigation water to the WM Canal at the Maricopa-Stanfield Irrigation and Drainage District. The tests show that the water is efficiently delivered to the users and water level deviations at all locations are small. The control is compared to the results from an advanced Linear Quadratic Regulator control method, also tested on the actual canal.